Ideas

If I could be so bold and claim to have a writing style I would readily admit that it is far from developed.  I have a few ideas that float around in my head and always, in my opinion, seem to start off my little pieces with great gusto but somehow after about five hundred words or so everything fizzles out and I have to draw it to a rapid conclusion.  I have no idea how I’m ever going to get around to writing that novel that is inside me unless I make it a collection of very short but interrelated stories.  The ideas for my tales come from a variety of sources, perhaps something that I have seen or something that someone has said to me or even a thought that flashes into my head as if by magic.  I take the time to craft the words carefully to be interesting (to me) and to stretch my writing and I am proud that my work, whilst perhaps not too novel or enlightening is at least all of my own creation, or so I thought.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been reading ‘The sixth day’ by Primo Levi, a collection of creative and inventive short stories covering a range of varied and interesting topics.  I’ve really enjoyed it especially as a lot of his ideas are like mine but obviously much better presented and much better written.   I could describe how excited I am to think that I am on the same page as a great writer and that somehow our minds have been working in parallel although separated by time and geography, working on similar themes that bind the human race together and make us who we are.  But I have come to realise that I have read this book before, several years ago now and long enough ago for it to have faded from my immediate memory.  Somewhere deep in my mind I recall the stories though, I’m able to remember the characters as old friends and whilst I struggle to remember the detail I recall the plots or the threads of the stories shortly after starting them.

Many of his stories have nothing to do with my little pieces but at times there is a subtle but obvious relationship between them, a hint of an idea or a shadow of a plot, nothing more obvious than the ghost of a connection.  But now I am concerned and my writing has hit a flaw.  I’m wondering if the ideas inside my head are mine at all, indeed have ever been mine or if my writing is just a rehash or a regurgitation of other people’s work.  Am I a sham, a fraud, a word thief, who can tell?  Haven’t all words been used, all ideas thought and all stories been told before?  Isn’t the skill of a writer contained in the ability to make these words, ideas and stories seem fresh and new and exciting to the reader?

When I think about it many writers only have a very few stories to tell, that is why people buy them as they know what they are going to get but they manage to tell them over again in ways that entertain and hold the reader to the end.  I’ve not set out to copy or to plagiarise and how can I help it that my ideas come from within the body of human consciousness?  My five hundred words are up and so I need to stop worrying about it and just keep on with my attempts at writing, wherever inspiration comes from.